Yes? And I consider most of those to also be points of frustration I have with MB2. It's not that I have a problem with ambushes per se, but I have a problem with completely unanticipatable insta-kill ambushes (which includes insta-knockdown ambushes). I'm inclined to agree with Achilles that sec-nade in particular is just bullshit free damage in far too many situations. Not that I mind the concept of knockdown, I just mind that sec-nade has very poor counterplay options for gunner classes.
That being said, the current state of the game could be fine in a competitive context, where people with Force Sense communicate constantly, but I'm sliding towards agreeing with Achilles (pretty sure he said something like this at some point a while ago) that the game should be balanced for Open mode rather than for the very rare competitive matches. As in: less rock-paper-scissors between all the classes.
The competitive scene just isn't there, especially for NA.
And I don't like dying to something unanticipatable, something with no counterplay other than "pray for one of the few competitively-minded, teamwork-minded NA players to join my team and agree to work together." Although I suppose other counterplay options for pragmatic stealth include: 1. let the rest of my team walk in front of me and trigger the traps, 2. pick my way along extremely slowly, burning a ton of time checking for every possible ambush.
Agree with your arguments but getting shot from behind in a long hallway is also impossible to anticipate unless you have prior information about the enemy team's positioning. If it's a normal gun you'll just lose some HP and continue the fight with a disadvantage, if it's a sniper shot you insta die. Does this mean that any ability or weapon that has the potential to 1shot you, and also abilities that can severely incapacitate/cripple you (knockdown), should disappear ?
Because make no mistake, even if such instakill abilities or weapons had huge indicators to make them super easy to anticipate, there will still be situations in which you can't anticipate them, and situations where even if you do anticipate them you have no way to escape. In Overwatch you have a plethora of such abilities (mainly ultimate abilities) that can instakill you, they have MONSTROUS visual and audio indicators, and you even have another plethora of abilities (not even mainly ultimate abilities) to counter/escape them; yet people still die to them very often, unable to counter/escape. Because the enemies using them do so with the correct timing and positioning. If you're hanzo and a winston 1v1 is ulting in your face, you're gonna die no matter what you do, much like how you're gonna die if you got ambushed and knocked down by a wookiee as a mando.
However using teamwork you won't die beacuse you'll get healed. In mb2 there's no healing but using teamwork will still be the only way to approach certain situations when you've picked a certain class that gets counters by another, or when you get ambushed and can't do anything about it. Sure, teamwork is barely a thing in open mode play, but that doesn't mean the game shouldn't be designed around it - if it wasn't, that would extremely severely dumb it down.
Nevertheless Achilles' argument of "with superior/far superior skill any class should be able to defeat another, even if the game is designed around teamwork" still stands at this point. To counter it i would invoke the fact that mb2 strives hard to be "realistic in the star wars sense", far more so than any other star wars game ever released. Sure it could do so even more, but the whole point is that it already does quite alot, enough to give a unique feel to it. Several factors make it that way, especially the lack of respawns and the fact that you have a set amount of resources/abilities/ammo at the start of a round, the harshness of certain abilities given that you have no respawns. There's a reason it's meant to be a "star wars counter-strike" from the start. Moreover in non-competitive play it gives you sort of a feeling of pressure because you care more about surviving even though it's objective-based, which is a particularly addictive feeling (mainly because when you get kills, they aren't just gonna respawn so it's really satisfying). This paired with the fact that all these "frustrating abilities" exist, gives a particularly "realistic" feeling when playing, and removing even some of them would reduce it. Now i'm not saying totally removing sec frags would hurt too bad. But reduce the strength of melee wooks & snipers on top of it and it's already severely affecting the game. Twisting it so that any class can beat any other class 1v1 given enough skill difference removes a crucial part of that realistic feel: you shouldn't be able to do that. Not to mention alot of the mad fun you get playing mb2 when not tryharding, using all these "unfair uncounterable" abilities.
